The Imperial formation broke up, as she knew it would, and abruptly they were all moving as one, like fish shoaling, heading for the College district.
Attack. It was a pitiful signal to be sending, but she had already decided that, whatever the Wasps were after, she was committed to opposing it. She let the Esca race ahead, knowing that the others were still with her, left and right. She wanted to say a great deal more, to explain that the Farsphex pack would split once she attacked, some turning to meet her while the others pressed on with their mission. The Collegiate flash-codes were a language of few words, though. She had to trust that they would predict the future as well as she did.
She had the trigger pressed even before she was in range, seeing their pattern shift into carefully orchestrated chaos, orthopters peeling off and swinging back towards her from above and from either side. At least half their force was casting itself lightly over the College now, turning in unison to find their target.
Taki swore and dived after them, still shooting, trusting to her swift flying, to the Esca ’s nimbleness against the larger machines. A scatter of bolts sprayed past her, leaving a single finger’s-width hole in one wing. Around and behind her, the handful of Stormreaders engaged, fearless by necessity.
She was closing now, watching the craft ahead of her, seeing how their attack run forced them to become predictable, killable, if just for a moment. But then, so did hers as she tunnel-visioned in on them, desperate for a kill that might make them break off. Even as the silvery trail of her shot swept in towards a flier in the midst of their formation, piercer bolts were abruptly hammering into her fuselage, the physical impact rocking her, knocking the Esca ’s tail sideways, spoiling her aim and making her entire orthopter slew in the air. She cursed, wrestling to get back on target, close now, closer than she had wanted. She actually saw the first bombs drop.
Then another bolt cracked into the engine mounting behind her, the next shattered a pane of her cockpit window, skinning a line of pain down her shoulder as it vanished into her seat. She threw the Esca sideways instinctively, the city beneath her opening up in flames as the bombs struck. She had left it too long, made herself too much of a target. She was going to die.
But she lived. The Esca suffered a riddled wing, silk parting, wood slats fracturing as the bolts tore into it, but the expected lethal shock never came. Her machine dropped involuntarily towards the flames before she could catch it, and the Farsphex that had been after her coursed overhead, banking in the air to dodge the incoming shot of one of the Mynans, who was slinging his Stormreader through the air like a madman to keep another two Imperial machines off his tail.
The Esca regained its hold on the air, and she saw the sky above her turned into a madness of wheeling, duelling orthopters. Instantly she was dragging back on the stick, fighting upwards to take her place there but, even as she did, she knew she was too late.
One of the Mynans lost a wing suddenly, the Stormreader coming apart as a Farsphex ripped into it from an unexpected angle. The next second, the stricken machine was whirling past Taki, spinning like a top with its one wing still beating. Taki was shooting by then, setting up a stream of bolts and then trying to find a target to bring it to bear on. Their bombing run had been disrupted now, but the Wasps had decided to make a fight of it at last, bolstering their impeccably coordination with two-to-one odds.
She had a direct line on one of the enemy and, just for a moment, gave it a solid couple of seconds of shot and saw it lurch in the air, shuddering. The bombs that had been cascading from its undercarriage, as regular as ants from a hill, abruptly stopped though the machine flew on. Then she was dancing and dodging through the air as a couple of the enemy came for her, keeping out of the way of their aim but unable to fight back. She saw Edmon’s Stormreader spiralling upwards, chasing one of the enemy even as another tried to bring him down. In the next instant, Pendry Goswell was scudding past them, scoring a couple of strikes as she did, but she was lurching in the air, her machine already damaged, the beat of her wings erratic. A moment later they simply stopped, some vital piece of clockwork slipping its train, and Taki watched her helpless and achingly graceful arc as her stalled machine fell into its final dive.
Then, and all together, the Imperial machines were on the run — or at least they were evading pursuit, taking off with wings fixed and heading east. We’ve driven them away! Taki exalted, but almost immediately she guessed that the Empire was simply heading to refuel. So where are they going? If they had built a nest so close to the city, then these attacks could be an hourly occurrence.
She sent the Esca after them without even thinking about it, and when she glanced around she saw three Stormreaders joining her in the pursuit, two with Mynan colours and one of the more ambitious local pilots, looking like Corog Breaker himself by the way he flew.
Behind them, smoke rose from a handful of points across Collegium, and Taki felt that she was escaping a report on the damage, as much as chasing the enemy. What did we lose? What people, what machines? And if the Mynans hadn’t been so paranoid as to have their machines standing by at all hours, how much more might we have lost? It was not that the Mynans had known what was going to happen, of course. It was just that, this once, their particular breed of fearful, vengeful craziness had turned out to be entirely justified.
The chase went on for barely fifteen minutes, the Imperials pulling ahead noticeably, forcing Taki to admire the design that allowed them to switch from fixed to mobile wings — and so fluidly! She had seen it, or half-seen it, in Capitas but she had underestimated the applications of the idea.
But, still, they must have a base around here somewhere. Where’s the Wasps’ nest, eh? But the distance between hunters and prey only increased, and the Collegiate orthopters were beginning to tire, springs losing their strength, wings working with less of a will.
The last glimpse Taki had of the Farsphex that day showed them still heading solidly eastwards, with no suggestion at all that they were about to land.
Twenty-One
Taki had asked Corog Breaker to call all the pilots together as soon as they were back on the ground. They had met hurriedly, almost conspiratorially, before any of the great and the good of Collegium could presume to interfere.
We are the elite of the air, Taki told herself. Scanning their faces, some looking determined, some stunned, she hoped that they felt the same way.
The Mynans still clustered together, but the distance between them and the others had decreased. They had shared something now, and it was the Collegiate fliers who had drawn closer to the mindset of their guests. They took a roll-call of their losses. Thyses, one of the Mynans, was dead. Collegium had lost three, although Pendry Goswell was miraculously still among the living, the first of them to have to rely on the new glider chutes that had been developed for those whose Art did not permit them to fly.
By that time they had some representatives of the ground crew with them, listening in, and a couple of academics from the aviation department, including Willem Reader, who had furnished Collegium’s orthopter model with half of its name. Technically, Corog Breaker was in charge, but he deferred to Taki without her having to ask. The man was all pomp and shouting during peacetime, but now the Empire had somehow managed to attack his city, he was purely business.
They made their plans: Taki proposed and, with a minimum of discussion, they approved. There was no suggestion of consulting the Assembly or any higher authority. In a city so bound by bureaucracy and hierarchy, this independence told Taki that they understood. The Assembly wasn’t there; they won’t understand. Only us. Only we are fit to helm the course of the air war.
Well, us and the Wasps, obviously. An unhappy thought, and she would have to talk with the better aeronautical minds about just what the Wasps had achieved in their aviation technology, and in their military practice, to pull off the attack that had just happened.
By the time a messenger had come from the Amphiophos demanding that s
he attend some council of war, the pilots had already held their own Assembly, passed their own motions and set their own destiny.
The council of war was remarkably restrained, although Taki guessed that it would become larger and more burdened with pointless opinions as time went on. For now she was faced only with Stenwold himself and the leaders of the three Merchant Companies: the Beetle-kinden Janos Outwright and Elder Padstock, and Marteus the Tarkesh renegade.
‘What did we lose?’ she asked, before Stenwold could start interrogating her.
‘The Teremy Square airfield was hit hard,’ Stenwold told her. ‘We lost eight Stormreaders on the ground there, four elsewhere. You and yours managed to keep them from inflicting crippling damage on our air capability, anyway.’
‘So what was the big bang?’ Taki asked him. ‘Just before they took off, they hit something near the College hard.’
‘Factories,’ Stenwold confirmed. ‘Four of them along Read Road were gutted pretty much entirely. They’re still going through the rubble, but all they’re finding are bodies.’
Taki frowned, and then a sudden fear gripped her. ‘The Stormreader factories?’
Stenwold managed a wan smile. ‘It’s strange how things work out, sometimes. If this attack had come just a tenday ago, then we’d have lost most of our ability to replenish our airforce. As it was, three of the factories were being converted to work on automotives. My project. The Stormreader facilities had been moved to the Coalway workshops, on the other side of the College. From a certain point of view, we were very lucky. Their spies are just a little out of date.’
‘We need more machines, as many as we can put in the air,’ Taki told him. ‘Seriously — their army’s still a good way down the coast from here, but somewhere they’ve got an airfield. How they managed that, I have no idea, but we need scouting patrols and, at the same time, we need a strong flight on the airfields ready to fly the moment they come back. That could be tomorrow, Master Maker. That could be later today.’
‘I’m putting a proposal before the Assembly today,’ Stenwold stated. ‘I suspect that it will pass, in light of the attack. I don’t think it would pass any other way, certainly.’ He looked tired, maybe sick. ‘Every workshop and factory in the city must be ready to help the war effort, from the big mercantile concerns to little family-run machine shops. It’s not just your orthopters, and it’s not my automotives, either. We need more snapbows, piercer bolts, spare parts, tools, artillery ammunition, explosives… We’ve seen now how fast the Empire can move, so we need to get ourselves up to the same speed. You’ll have your fliers, and you’ll be run off your feet training people how to use them, too. We’ll have a call for volunteers across the city, and I hope that people will look at the smoke rising from Read Road and realize that it’s now fight or fall.’
You’re not before the Assembly now, Maker, thought Taki, because rhetoric always annoyed her. ‘And if you don’t get your volunteers?’ she asked.
‘Then I go back to the Assembly with an alternative motion,’ he replied grimly.
Helleron had been a joke. The Eighth Army had marched in from what had recently been Three-city Alliance land, leaving behind it the shattered walls of Myna and Szar, and a battle still raging at Maynes, where elements of the Fifth had been moved in to free Roder for his advance. The Ants of Maynes were no more technologically accomplished than their allies, Roder knew, but they were certainly more stubborn. There was talk of razing the city entirely, by way of a lesson, deporting the whole population to remote corners of the Empire as slaves. It had never been done before, to even the most rebellious of cities, but times were changing. The Slave Corps had seen all the advances that real soldiers were making to the Empire’s prosperity, Roder thought sourly, and were trying to introduce an innovation or two of their own.
If he had thought it would work, he would have cheered them to the echo, but he read nothing but greed in their proposition. Now, if we had some Bee-killer handy, that might be a different matter. That near-mythical weapon that had been deployed just the once in the last war was still a subject of heated conjecture. True, the only deaths it had caused had been the Empire’s own garrison at Szar, but for connoisseurs of destruction the results had been remarkable: the entire garrison, every living thing, wiped out in a night, without struggle. And it could so easily have been the Szaren. If we’re going to teach lessons, let us teach them all a lasting one.
Roder knew that there were some, back in the capital, who believed such a weapon was going too far. He also knew that the star of such white-livered philosophers was on the wane. No weapon was too great, so sang the Engineering Corps, so long as it is in our hands. Roder agreed, being a modern kind of general.
The path to Helleron had been prepared long ago by Consortium merchants and Rekef agents. Twelve of the Council of Thirteen had met Roder’s delegation willingly, happy to become a protectorate of the Empire and also a free city, as Roder understood Solarno had been declared, down south. Roder himself would rather have locked the entire pack of treacherous vermin up and packed them off to the mines at Shalk, but he had no authority to do so. The job of bringing the Helleren into the Empire’s fold had already been achieved, by pen and coin, long before he arrived. All he managed to do was extort some supplies from the city’s stores and provide some of his soldiers a night’s worth of entertainment, and even then they were kept on a short leash, allowed the bare minimum of violence and pillage, just enough to remind the Helleren of who was now in control. Everything, even the expected casualties of the night’s revelry, was set out in advance by the Consortium magnates in charge. With that sort of bureaucracy tying his hands, Roder was glad to be back on the road.
Like Tynan’s Second, the Eighth was mechanized, supplies and siege equipment and much of its manpower being moved by automotives and by a flight of airships in this case as Sarn’s aerial capability was reckoned considerably less than Collegium’s. Scout orthopters kept an eye out, day and night, for a Sarnesh army either advancing cross-country or up the rails, but all suggestion was that the Ants had not calculated on the speed of the Imperial advance, and were only just on the point of setting out from their own gates by the time Roder was in sight of Malkan’s Stand.
He knew how the Lowlanders named the place Malkan’s Folly, as a slap in the face of the Empire that was, he hoped, about to be redressed. The Ants had built their grandest fortress there, as impressive a defensive edifice as Roder had ever seen through a telescope, and he supposed that it said a great deal about the Sarnesh mindset — perhaps the mindset of all Ant-kinden everywhere.
We could just go round it. A single fortress could not hope actually to hold up an army that was desperate to get to Sarn. All those solid walls would necessitate only a minor detour, Roder knew. However, the Sarnesh strategy was not quite so foolish. The point of the fortress at Malkan’s Stand was to be unassailable, so that the sizeable complement of troops within could use it as a sally-point to attack any enemy force that tried to pass them. If Roder pushed on to Sarn he would find himself engaged front and rear through that peerless ability of the Ants to bring all their forces to bear at the same time. So it was that the Ants would have their wish. He would have no choice but to bring down the walls of Malkan’s Stand before he marched on Sarn.
He no longer had the Colonel-Auxillian and his protege to call upon, the pair of them having been called off for some even more urgent business at the capital, but Colonel Ferric was more than competent enough to manage the machines that they had left, and there was already a plan in place for this stage of the war.
Malkan’s Stand was certainly a formidable prospect, he decided, passing the lens of his glass over the walls. The place bristled with artillery, and all of it ready manned, since the Sarnesh could hardly fail to notice their approach. He wondered what word they had received from the Three-city refugees. He had been informed that a reasonably sized force of Alliance soldiers had already passed this way heading for sanctuary in Sarn,
and there would have been civilians strung out all the way from here to Myna; the Slave Corps had taken up a fair few on the road. How well prepared are the Ants, then, eh?
That artillery had sufficient elevation to out-range anything that General Malkan’s own Seventh Army might have brought to the original battle fought on this ground. Any attempt to bring such engines to bear on the fortress walls would be doomed, the machines smashed to pieces before they could ever launch their first missile.
General Malkan had not possessed Drephos’s greatshotters, of course. Nor did he have the improved stone-eater acids, the rock-breaker explosives, the pinpoint accuracy of the ratiocinators that could deliver alternating rounds of each to the same precise point over and over for as long as it took.
‘Colonel?’ he grunted.
‘Range is extreme, but viable,’ Ferric reported. Behind him the construction of the greatshotters was proceeding swiftly, the cities of the Alliance having granted the artificers sufficient practice. ‘We can expect them to make a sortie, I would imagine, once they realize what we’re doing, sir.’
‘We’re ready for them,’ Roder murmured, lowering the telescope at last. The rank and file of the Eighth were already throwing up earthworks, forming their own makeshift fortress to slow any Sarnesh attack enough so that the massed snapbows could have their way with as many Ants as the enemy chose to send out. Conventional artillery, such as leadshotters, were being emplaced to take on automotives, and the Spearflight wings were ready to fly, either to take on Sarnesh air power or to bomb the fortress itself.
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